Just tell me your safeword and let's go

Cyber Tracker is a dystopian drama that examines the dichotomy between law and justice via a near-future setting in which corporate America mechanises a recently-privatised court system.  This dichotomy plays out via exploding fire engines and people being kicked in the head until they fall over and/or explode, with noted thespians Don "The Dragon" Wilson and Richard "Australian" Norton never quite getting a good throwdown between them despite this being what any fan of early-90s head-kicking has turned up to watch.  I made the mistake of not watching this drunk, so not enjoying its knuckle-dragging charms for what they are is entirely on me, though I did like Don Wilson's hilariously terrible Flashback Wife, who huffs out the door towards an offscreen divorce so Don can swig whiskey in the dark while listening to the sexy voice of his home computer, and the closest he gets to hanging out with a real woman until like the last twenty minutes of the film is some jailbait he runs into for some reason.  For what it's worth, I'm pretty sure this was weird behavior in the 1990s, too.

Bone Tomahawk - The Searchers by way of The Hills Have Eyes, with Kurt Russell's grizzled small town sheriff setting out to rescue a deputy and a doctor from Native American cannibals.  Additional good turns from Patrick Wilson and Ed Norton can't stop a functional western horror from looking remarkably cheap for all the talent involved.

It was all for the best. All of it.

Music is resonance, vibration, and energy, and resonance, vibration, energy: these are the foundation of our plane of existence, composed as it is of protons and neutrons orbiting and vibrating in so perfect a synchronicity that they hold close and sustain each other across the lifespan of our universe (whatever that may turn out to be).  That vibration and resonance is the music that holds all things together, and it's hard to escape a suspicion that somehow the Goblin King tapped into that form of music like he did so many others and became a part of it, because he feels like he's everywhere.
It seems at the very least rude to say - on this of all days - that I am not a David Bowie fan, but it's the truth: I was not a devotee, I didn't know my Hunky Dory from my Black Tie White Noise, I just knew him as a presence in popular culture like Noel Edmonds or something - there, but enigmatic.
Having said that, I think back and I get all the references to him in popular culture, like a scene from The Venture Brothers which uses his lyrics for dialogue, or comic stories that riff on his song titles - I knew what these things were referring to without being told, so perhaps I was a fan all along without acknowledging it, or possibly Bowie has made so much music that has so influenced the world around us that like a bird chirping back a ringtone in a park, some subtle vibration within the world has been altered by the tunes he created and Bowie has now become a part of the DNA of our reality.
When I heard David Bowie had died, I didn't believe it, but the more I thought about it, the more I wonder why I doubted it.  I mean, was I thinking "he can't be dead - he still has so much to do"?  It's David Fucking Bowie we're talking about here, what's he got left to do?  If I'm doubting he died, it's because I suspect he ran out of things to do and turned his hand to another bit of reinvention.  I choose to believe that, then - that he has not left us, he's got back into his music.

I wanted to get you a bazooka but apparantly there are laws

A bit of seasonal cheer from myself and Lee Robson in the shape of a strip we ran up what you can read, like...

It's aptly a space-y thing because Christmas for me is defined by memories of one of the Star Warses being repeated for the umpteenth time, which I mention as a seamless intro into reviewing the latest Star Wars movie, The Force Awakens, as it is a law that internet reviews of TFA start with an anecdote about the franchise's personal connection with the reviewer.
I did not think The Force Awakens was very good.
I couldn't get the feel that this was actually Star Wars, it just felt like someone doing a homage to the Star Wars I remember but not quite getting it right because they aren't really emulating the old stuff, they're just using the trappings like the ship designs, the laser noises, and the names of characters - fanfiction, basically, and if you've ever seen one of the half-decent Star Wars fanfics available, you'll know what I mean when I say it's nice to look at, but the tiny things here and there undermine the proposition that you're watching something official.
I fully appreciate that this is a minority opinion, all the same, as the vast majority of people seem to be over the moon about The Force Awakens, or at the very least they're over the moon that it isn't the prequels, as every review seems to be born of some variation of the same basic conceit that this one wasn't made by George Lucas so it is automatically good, and never mind the slapdash art design, the rehashing of the Death Star plot yet again, a McGuffin that makes literally no sense whatsoever, massive coincidences stringing together the various scenes rather than actual plot connective tissue, and a villain whose entire deal is that he will never be as good as Darth Vader from the original trilogy, which is awful to behold onscreen and yet at the same time a brass-balls level of self-awareness of a kind the rest of the script might have benefited from experiencing.  Ironically, The Force Awakens' biggest problems are the exact same problems that plagued the prequels (such as the impression that it is a remarkably small galaxy in terms of characters crossing each others' paths), and yet this time audiences and reviewers are happy to hand-wave away such concerns, where before they were baying for the blood of George Lucas.
Mind you, the prequels grew on me over time, so perhaps The Force Awakens will do the same, as it seems to rely entirely on nostalgia as its one selling-point, and that takes time and distance to develop.

What will we do without a shower - where am I supposed to cry?

It would certainly have made the uneven and cliched Jessica Jones a lot more enjoyable if I'd got that memo everyone else did telling me I was supposed to be enjoying rape backstories for tough female characters now, rather than finding them tiresome and lazy storytelling, but here we are again with Into The Badlands.  A post-apocalyptic martial arts series based on Journey To The West - the only Chinese story that has ever been written apparently - it's not always misogynistic trash, it's just that those elements tend to stick out more amongst the mish-mash of other things appropriated from elsewhere.  The kung-fu is often inventive and fun, and carries the rest of the show well, though mostly it's just a nice-looking power struggle in a setting that looks like a conflation of a stereotypical Asian culture and Depression-era America.  It's not rocket science, but it's engaging enough to hold the attention so far, coming off as a well-made late-80s/early-90s straight-to-video post-apocalyptic action film - and lord knows, I do like me some of them.
Of the aforementioned Jessica Jones, I can only say that while by no means a poorly-made show, for me it is likely the weakest of the Marvel offerings so far, reliant as it is upon well-worn storytelling tropes and the dubious novelty of a female lead in an age where roughly 90 percent of television has a female lead.  To make their female lead more distinctive in a crowded field, they make her unlikeable and give her many character flaws - yes, you can already see where I'm going with this, can't you?  There is nothing new to be seen in Jessica Jones, though its attempts to second-guess its audience's tolerance for spandex-clad adventurers might be noteworthy, as it has spectacularly bet on the wrong horse in a tv season notable for having quite a few successful and highly visible superhero shows in contrast to JJ taking the well-worn "it's a superhero show but we don't do superheroes in it" beloved of Smallville and Heroes, now possibly as much an embarrassing anachronism in itself as adventurers in primary-coloured unitards once were.

Atlas Shrugged - and so did most of its readers

Well, there's nothing like a well-maintained blog, and this is nothing like etc etc
Why did no-one tell me about Blood And Oil?  A tale of rich white trash and their literal/figurative catfights, starring Don "I survived the eighties but you can't tell by looking" Johnson and various b-listers I recognise from television shows I presumably watched during a period where I was questioning my sexuality such as "him from Greek", "her from Jane By Design", and a whole bunch of "that one from that thing that was crap but I watched all the way through anyway", it's just the kind of awful I can't resist.  Obviously, this likely means it's been cancelled already, but I am enjoying playing catch-up so far, even if watching episodes without the stopgap of a week in between does tend to highlight how quickly it loses its most interesting elements, especially the setting of the opening episode, where the locale is painted as a kind of gold-rush era frontier town never more than a hair's breadth away from lawlessness (a fictional oil find in Dakota replacing the factual gold of old California), which falls by the wayside along with the broke-as-heck young couple who land in town with only the clothes on their backs and yet can manage to take out a hundred thousand dollar loan before the end of the pilot and are buying a half-million dollar house by the second episode, thus further robbing USTV of money-poor characters - but this is about a fantasy version of America, not the daily experience of 95 percent of its population, so all is forgiven, Blood and Oil.

As they say in my native South Carolina, "It's time to marry your brother-in-law"

Covert Affairs was shit, and Quantico is some next-level Godawful shitness I can't even bring myself to tear apart piece by shitty piece lest I be responsible for someone reading my words and deciding that it sounds so bad it must be good rather than just so bad it's bad - but to clarify, there is no hypothetical scenario in which there is a dial measuring Quantico's quality which features a needle swinging all the way around on some imaginary dial from "bad" until it gets to "good" and then keeps going until it becomes "bad" again, because that would imply that at some point the needle nestled in the "good" area, and with Quantico that never happens, not even in the hypothetical realms of fantasy, because Quantico is never less than terrible.
Homeland aside, it is not a good time to be a female-led espionage series, so I do not even know why I decided to watch Agent X, which I knew ahead of time was Sharon Stone slumming it in tv because Hollywood does not forgive female actors for getting old.  I am glad that I did, however because Agent X is a hoot, and is a welcome antidote to the charmless po-faced faux-grimness that is live-action television's current default state outside Disney programming - did you know The New Girl was commissioned as a comedy?  Crazy.  What Agent X makes me think of is a Disney programme whose greenlit proposal has sat on a shelf for a while until it became apparent that the Mouseketeer for which it was originally written has decided to become batshit insane on a full-time basis and will not be available for filming because she's drunk-driven a car into the line outside an Apple store or married a badger or something so the script has been made anyway, with adults, only no-one has changed any of the preposterous premise before things went before a camera, so Agent X is the tale of Sharon Stone becoming Vice President of America which also means that she is now secretly M from James Bond, as was intended all along by the Founding Fathers when they wrote it down in the original draft of the Declaration of Independence, which the VP has in her secret Vice President Cave under the Library of Congress.
You really know all you need to at this point, it's a nonsense of a show and highly enjoyable for it, even if I am not quite sure where it's going in its portrayal of women types, as despite Stone being the headline act, this is a very male fantasy about a daring he-man saving young women from nasty Russkies.
It's early days and the rough edges could still be hewn off, but it seems to be off to a good start.

It's not for me to say, but have you considered investing in food and running water?

Not much to report today, as real life stuff had to be taken care of, so I couldn't sit down and construct one of my usual blogging masterpieces.  Still drawing away, though, so there's that.  Got a ton of Hawaii Five-0 to catch up on, so plenty of blog filler to come as I try and fail to disguise my man-crush on Scott Caan - a man so ludicrous that his own father showed up in his show once to tell the character played by Scott Caan that his dad must think he's ludicrous.  Yes, I am waffling away about the new series of Hawaii Five-0 and I haven't even watched an episode yet, so just imagine how fun the blog will be once I've actually binged on a couple of hours' worth of it.